Meanwhile at the North Dallas Office

This past Monday marked the beginning of a new career and a new adventure. After over 3 years at EMC I have moved on to a new company. This means I am also getting back to my technical roots and rolling up my sleeves to help build something with Tegile. Good news for the readers is that you may find more specifically valuable content along with my normal evangelizing on the blog. I was asked what would happen to my blog and had a good friend point out that nothing I said previously was false. So why should anything happen to my blog. I have spoken for years about the benefits of deduplication and compression in a data protection environment. In fact, it’s not just a benefit, it’s a requirement. That is still true regardless of where my paycheck comes from. But what if I could take all of the advantages that deduplication brings to data protection and apply them to my primary array? What if instead of letting meta data cause my system to be limited by the laws of physics, I could instead use it to my advantage and squeeze every last drop of performance out of my array? What if I could also leverage flash technology to further accelerate and ensure availability of my data? And what if I could use DRAM as a caching layer as well as that eMLC flash? Well, then I’d be talking about the Zebi array. A Hybrid array that leverages flash and DRAM to accelerate performance and uses traditional spinning disk to provide capacity. All of this built from the ground up to be a hybrid array with software that can drive all flash or a mixed flash and spinning disk configuration.

There is a lot of change coming in the storage market without question. Flash is a big part of that equation and how it is leveraged is what differentiates one product from another. That topic and how deduplication enables more than just data protection will be what this blog will continue to focus on. I have found that the different flavors of arrays available on the market today is confusing at best. So I will do everything I can to cut through some of that hype and clutter and help education my users as I learn a few things along the way.